The crowd-sourced documentary "Into the Fire" was shot in April 2012 in Athens, Greece, and was made publicly available a year later. The film chronicles immigrants' lives in Greece during the recent years of financial and political crisis in which they've faced brutal attacks by neo-Nazis and suffered under corrupt state law.
Greece receives an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the migrants and refugees who flee from countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Bangladesh and Syria. For a small country of 10 million people, it is a massive number of immigrants to absorb, most of whom are unable to apply for asylum.
The immigrant's journey to Europe usually sets out from Turkey, and in most cases includes a small rickety boat on which hundreds of people are crowded after paying the contractor a large amount of money to escort them to safety.
Slave trading boats arrive in the Greek islands near the coast of Turkey several times a month. It is not unusual that the boats sink due to poor weather conditions, resulting in scores of dead bodies turning up along the Greek coast.
Greece was never organized enough to accept such large migration waves. The Albanian immigrants of the 1990s were the first who survived Greece's immigration “no-policy,” enduring huge lines and a labyrinth of laws that turned their simple immigration cases into a nightmare. Most of them finally overcame the racism and other obstacles they encountered, because at that time the country was prospering at five percent annual growth and there were jobs on the market.
There are two main differences between the refugees and immigrants who showed up then, and those turning up in the last six years. First, almost nobody these days wants to stay and work in Greece, which offers little more than a passage for their journey into Western Europe.
Second, if they attempt to find a job of any kind, most of the time they are unsuccessful. The country is hovering around 27 percent unemployment after six straight years of recession.
Now, many argue that the country is simply unable to keep accepting such large numbers of migrants. “It is not fair for such a small country suffering a huge economic crisis to have the burden to take care of almost all the migrants of Europe,” said Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias in a BBC interview earlier this year.
As a result, the Greek government is demanding changes to the Dublin II treaty, 10 years after the regulation was first amended in 2003. According to Dublin II, refugees entering on EU ground are allowed to apply for asylum only in the state of their first entrance. The European Union is helping Greece cope with the influx by employing Frontex forces on the Greek borders, and funding some programs for the building of infrastructure to provide shelter to those migrants who arrive.
According to statistics, Greece is paying 240 million euros annually to the program while the EU is supporting the country with an additional 147 million euros for the services. But a year after the filming of "Into the Fire," the situation has worsened. Evidence has emerged that the government isn't using the money it receives to provide essential services to migrants.
The film does an impressive job presenting the third world-type conditions faced by migrants in the asylum application centers. In late 2012, Greece's government planned mass arrests of migrants in Athens and other major cities, and concentrated them in detention camps where they have essentially remained prisoners, unable to leave.
As "Into the Fire" reveals, a majority of migrants, although they have committed no crime, have essentially become trapped in a country they wanted to leave.
Last summer, some detainees in the camps started hunger strikes to protest for better conditions. They demanded air-conditioning in small rooms where the summer temperature often reaches 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), and an end to their maximum imprisonment time of 18 months.
The numerous hate attacks against migrants by members of Greece's neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, are emphasized in the documentary along with the increasing cooperation between the extreme right and police. The party, which had just 0.3 percent support in 2009, received seven percent of the vote in the 2012 general election and now has 18 ministers in Greek Parliament.
Meanwhile, the government up until this week had not taken a clear position against the neo-Nazi attacks, while police forces have remained complicit and repeatedly failed to arrest attackers and enforce the law.
Being a migrant in Greece is fraught with many difficulties, not least of which is the risk of death during the journey and the near impossibility of finding work once they arrive. The immunity that the Golden Dawn parliamentarians are to this day enjoying makes the situation even more complex — and it makes "Into the Fire" an important film for people to watch today.
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